Forgotten stories from the pages of history. Join us for surprising and curious tales from the past and challenge yourself with our lateral thinking puzzles.
365 episodes transcribedIn 1952, French physician Alain Bombard set out to cross the Atlantic on an inflatable raft to prove his theory that a shipwreck victim can stay aliv...
In August 1980, an extortionist planted a thousand-pound bomb in Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in western Nevada. Unless the owners paid him $3 million...
In 1897, confused physician Edward J. Goodwin submitted a bill to the Indiana General Assembly declaring that he'd squared the circle -- a mathematic...
In 1928, 199 runners set out on a perilous 3,400-mile footrace across America, from Los Angeles to Chicago and on to New York. The winner would recei...
In 1863 the residents of Sandy Cove, Nova Scotia, discovered a legless man on the shore of St. Mary's Bay. He spoke no English and could not tell the...
Here are five new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situa...
In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll take a tour through some oddities and unanswered questions from our research, including w...
Seemingly safe in northern New England, the residents of St. Albans, Vermont, were astonished in October 1864 when a group of Confederate soldiers ap...
Early one morning in 1912, the residents of Villisca, Iowa, discovered a horrible scene: An entire family had been brutally murdered in their sleep....
On June 23, 1858, the Catholic Church removed 6-year-old Edgardo Mortara from his family in Bologna. The reason they gave was surprising: The Mortara...
In 1862, slave Robert Smalls was working as a pilot aboard a Confederate transport ship in Charleston, S.C., when he seized a unique chance to escape...
A quarter million Frenchmen vanished in World War I, leaving their families no clue whether they were still alive. During these anxious years, a lone...
In the early days of English aviation, journalist C.C. Turner seemed to be everywhere, witnessing bold new feats and going on some harrowing adventur...
In 1982, college sophomore Gregory Watson got a C on a term paper arguing that a long-forgotten constitutional amendment could still be ratified. In...
In 1939, an ocean liner carrying 900 Jewish refugees left Nazi Germany seeking sanctuary in North America, but it was turned away by every nation it...
In 1947, the price of a candy bar in British Columbia rose from 5 to 8 cents, and the local teenagers organized a surprisingly effective "strike" tha...
In the 1920s Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola toured the United States and Europe to share the culture of his African homeland with fascinated audienc...
Almost nothing was known about Australia's elusive lyrebird until 1930, when an elderly widow named Edith Wilkinson encountered one on her garden pat...
In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll share seven oddities from Greg's research, from Arthur Conan Doyle's encounter with a per...
Here are six new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some strange situation...
